Why work experience can be life-changing for those transitioning out of the care system
Kathryn Greenwood, Head of Resourcing and New Talent at Severn Trent, leads the Midlands Employer Alliance’s care leavers workstream. We invited her to share her perspective on the impact of Severn Trent’s recent pilot.
Across the Midlands, around 2,500 young people transition out of the care system each year, facing particularly stark challenges. Statistics show that care leavers aged 19-21 are nearly four times as likely to be NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) compared to the average for young people as a whole. Additionally, 25% of the homeless population and 25% of those in prison have experienced care, and worryingly, 39% end up long-term unemployed.
Most businesses want to support their communities and give back, but supporting those transitioning out of the care system is one of the less well-trodden paths. The recent “Unlocking Youth Employment” report by ReGenerate and Youth Futures Foundation highlighted that 55% of employers felt they needed to do more to support care-experienced young people into employment, yet only 12% were doing anything proactive in this space.
The difficulty often lies in knowing where to start. Navigating the various third sector, public sector, and institutional entities that operate in this space can be challenging. There isn’t a central convener, and there is a lack of shared knowledge or learning from others. Having personally done a lot of work in this area over the past year, I can wholeheartedly agree that it is complex to navigate.
However, despite the complexity of the system, the intervention that many of these young people need to change the course of their lives is actually very simple: work experience. The “Unlocking Youth Employment” report concluded that young people are six times more likely to gain employment if they have completed one work experience placement. Most of us already offer work experience as part of our talent acquisition toolkits, acknowledging that it will be more systemic in some organisations than others. Our working hypothesis was therefore that it shouldn’t be that hard to do something very meaningful in this space, especially if we could take some of the heavy lifting out of the equation for businesses that wanted to get involved.
Over the past year, the Midlands Employment Alliance has been working on a blueprint to reduce the number of care-experienced young people across the Midlands from becoming NEETS and then transitioning to being unemployed. We felt that with the combined might of the businesses across the Midlands, we should challenge ourselves with a big, bold ambition. Our hope is that we eventually offer every young person in the Midlands who is transitioning out of the care system access to meaningful work experience if they want it. That equates to around 2,500 work experience placements a year if every young person took us up on the offer.
This year has been our incubator year, and we have navigated and learnt a lot. It started with a pilot that became a pathfinder project, highlighting the challenges, unknowns, and best ways to navigate them. We worked with Coventry City Council, the NEC, and my organisation, Severn Trent, on a care-experienced pilot. It involved two weeks of work experience, a career mentor for 12 months, four employability sessions, and a one-to-one with a recruiter. We also offered bespoke training for all our line managers and mentors, working in partnership with the Care Leavers Covenant, who have been a fantastic support throughout.
We were overwhelmed with the talent we had the benefit of meeting through the programme. One manager put it better than I ever could:
“He is remarkable. He has made such a huge impression on me. It’s really unique to meet anyone with such drive and hunger for success, such honesty and humility, and to be confident without a single hint of arrogance or entitlement. He just wants to squeeze everything possible from this and any future opportunity.”
The programme was small, but perfectly formed. It resulted in 50% of the participants gaining employment within three weeks of the programme finishing, and the remaining 50% all have good next steps planned for each of them with their career mentors.
Not only that, but one unintended gem of the programme was the amazing magic it spread through the organisations that took part. Line managers, mentors, and host teams were all left with such a feel-good factor that it undoubtedly positively impacted engagement scores.
It wasn’t without its challenges, for sure. We struggled with introductions to young people to fill the places on the programmes, and despite wanting to structure it as paid work experience, we found it hard to ensure that it didn’t have a detrimental impact on the young people’s benefits. So, we ended up providing gift vouchers to the participants who graduated from the programme at the celebration event.
Having now created what we feel is a good blueprint, we are focusing on scaling up our work. The next steps will involve bringing like-minded organisations across the Midlands together to do a larger programme of activity in unison. We aim to host 100 work experience placements as part of our next cohort and are looking for organisations to take part. We will hold your hand all the way through the process and share resources to take a lot of the heavy lifting out of the equation.
If you’re interested in taking part, please contact Harry Brown, Director at ReGenerate (harry.brown@re-generate.org).
